How Life Goes
by Min Daae
Summary: The real world doesn't know Sam, and Sam doesn't know the real world. AU post 6.14.


"We're not doing this anymore," Dean said, after Death shoved Sam's soul back in place, after the Wall he set up against Hell first cracked. "We're just not. You're done, and _I'm _done."

And Sam, still dizzy and confused (scared), had assumed that meant they were taking a break, maybe staying at Bobby's for a while, or going to some isolated house in the woods to recuperate. That wasn't it at all.

Sam didn't know what Lisa thought when they both turned up on her doorstep. Didn't really want to know. He assumed Dean had told her he was coming, because at least she didn't look surprised. Sam's first reaction was still to want to bolt.

She invited them in, anyway, and once they were alone Sam turned to Dean and said simply, "No."

Dean didn't turn around from rummaging through his bag. "No what?"

"This isn't going to work," Sam said.

"Why not?" Dean fished out a different shirt and shook it out, looking at it. Sam wondered if his brother was avoiding his gaze.

"It just-"

Dean turned, finally, and Sam caught a hint of something faintly desperate in his eyes. "Is there somewhere else you want to go, Sam?" and Sam understood that if he suggested somewhere, Dean would go there. Without a pause. Because he was worried and that was the way Dean _was. _Even if he wanted to stay here, even if he wanted to try to work things out with Lisa…

"No," he said, "No, it's fine."

Dean's eyebrows pulled together slightly. "Are you," he started to ask, and Sam didn't let himself think about it.

"Yeah," he said, "Yeah, I'm sure."

He didn't know what had happened, exactly, after all, but he did know by the way Dean avoided the subject that he definitely had something to do with the reason Dean and Lisa seemed tense and uncomfortable around each other. He owed his brother a lot he couldn't ever make up; he could manage living in a suburb.

~.~

It took Sam about a week to realize that he remembered next to nothing about living a stationary, ordinary life.

Somewhere in the distant past, Sam remembered Stanford; remembered being able to pass for normal and skate along under everyone's radar, unnoticed except when he wanted to be at first and later living with the girl of his dreams with his own group of friends, no one ever questioning the things left over from his other life.

He wasn't sure when that had changed.

The first time he was going for a walk in the morning and a rustle in the bushes startled him, he reached for a gun that wasn't there before realizing that it was a golden retriever digging a hole. The neighbors asked him questions he didn't know how to answer. Was he supposed to lie? How much?

In the grocery store he felt overwhelmed, around people he felt too tall and clumsy, his skin too tight. He kept waking up with screaming nightmares. In the morning he scanned the newspapers and his eyes went immediately to the obituaries. And Lisa watched him with something it took Sam too long to recognize as wariness.

She was polite. Sam didn't know what Dean had told her, but she was always polite, and always decidedly cool. Ben was even cooler, and didn't speak two words to him for the first week, going out of his way to avoid doing so. And then there was Dean, trying to mend his fences with Lisa and keeping half an eye on Sam at the same time, and sometimes Sam wondered if his brother was sleeping at all.

After one particularly bad nightmare, Sam woke to Dean sitting next to him. "Is it getting worse?" Dean asked, simply, and Sam could see in the half-dark all the weariness etched on his brother's face, the fear and exhaustion.

"No," he promised. "It's fine. Just the same stuff. It'll get better soon."

He slipped out and got a prescription for sleeping pills as soon as he got the chance, and kept them tucked away in his duffel that he'd never quite unpacked.

Sam stayed up late one night and went downstairs to get a glass of water. He stopped dead on hearing voices, and moved just enough to see Dean and Lisa sitting on the couch, closer together than he'd seen them for the last week and a half, speaking lowly, their bodies angled slightly toward each other.

He walked back up the stairs without getting any water, and couldn't tell if the voice whispering _you shouldn't be here, this isn't yours _was his own or someone else's.

~.~

"Where were you?" Lisa asked suddenly one morning, while Dean was still asleep and Ben was eating breakfast in sullen, stubborn silence. Sam blinked, surprised to hear a question so directly addressed to him. Sometimes he felt a little like a stray cat; taken in and fed but never welcomed.

"What?"

Lisa's mouth turned down slightly as she continued making eggs. She'd insisted on making one for Sam, but looking at them now made him feel vaguely sick. The night before his dreams had been full of blood and the slick-slime feeling of entrails used as bonds. Flashes, moments, within the deep darkness of sleep.

"This past year," she said. "Before you…reappeared, and everything started up again. Dean wouldn't say, but he acted like…like you were dead or something."

Lately, it hadn't just been sensation that Sam dreamed. A voice, too, soft and insinuating, and he almost thought he could hear it now. _She blames you. She's right to._ "Yeah," Sam said, and then didn't know what to say. _I don't know. I don't remember, _he thought about saying. It felt like there was a quiver somewhere inside, like the humming of a plucked string. "I don't…"

The world tilted. "Sam?" Dean's voice, from behind, bleary and confused. "Hey, what's-"

It's all gone.

After that it was all just flashes and afterimages and murmurs, insinuations, hints. _This is your future Sam this is all you'll ever-_

The world was right side up again. Dean was staring down at Sam's face, his eyes terrified and mouth set in a flat line. Sam blinked, feeling drained and exhausted and like he'd been pulled apart and put back together in the space of five minutes. "Jesus," Dean said. "Jesus fuck."

Sam closed his eyes. He could smell the eggs, slightly burnt now. "I'm fine," he mumbled. "It's okay-"

"What just…" That's Ben. For a moment Sam was confused what Ben was doing in Rhode Island, and then he remembered that was almost a month ago.

"M'sorry," Sam said, to no one in particular, and opened his eyes to find Dean, only to realize that Lisa was staring as well, looking somewhere between shocked and appalled. "How long?"

"Six fucking minutes," Dean said, not seeming conscious of the presence of his adopted son. He looked ashen. "Fuck, Sam, you said-"

"It doesn't mean anything," Sam insisted, because he'd lie and lie and lie if it meant getting that stricken expression off his brother's face. Dean just looked at him, though, and apparently Sam lost his talent for lying with the demon blood.

"Are you okay?" Lisa, actually, and her voice was a great deal more hushed. Sam wanted to flinch. "I didn't know…"

"Come on, Sam," Dean said, and there was something faintly hard in his voice, not quite harsh. "We have things to talk about."

Sam could feel the Braedens staring at his back all the way up the stairs, curiosity and confusion and worry, and it made him feel itchy and strange. He doesn't, after all, deserve any of it. This was what he chose when he jumped in the hole in Stull Cemetery, and he wouldn't take it back.

"Was it something Lisa said?" Dean asked, as soon as they were out of earshot. Sam blinked.

"What?"

"That set you off," Dean clarified, voice both tense and intense, intent. "Was it something she said? I told her not to ask-"

"No," Sam said, hastily. "No, it wasn't anything she…"

"Ben, then?"

"No," Sam insisted. He was glad he hadn't eaten. His guts felt like they were writhing inside him. "No, no one said anything," and too late he saw the despair in Dean's face and understood that his brother would rather blame anyone and anything, no matter if it was the woman he seemed to love.

"It was just a slip," Sam said, quickly. "On my part. My fault. I'm fine now."

Dean snorted. It didn't sound particularly amused. "You even know how much you use that word?" Then he shook his head and just said, "Sammy, please. Don't. Poke at it. You don't even know…" His brother swiped a hand over his face and glanced away. "You look wiped," he said, finally. "Think you could sleep?"

Sam felt like he could sleep forever. He didn't want to, though. "Yeah," he said anyway. "Sure."

~.~

"You didn't tell me he had seizures." Lisa sounded accusatory even in his dreams, and it took Sam a moment to understand that he wasn't dreaming at all. He cracked one eye and found Dean standing in the doorway, a glimpse of Lisa in front of him.

"I told you he had some issues," Dean said, tightly. Lisa made a small sound.

"That doesn't mean anything. You should have told me. If I'd known-"

"You'd what? What would you do differently, Lisa? If you can't deal with this...we'll go."

"No, that's not…" Lisa mumbled something under her breath that Sam couldn't make out. He did hear Dean's response, though, which was, "I didn't come here for your pity. Neither of us needs that." There was a long silence.

"I shouldn't have said what I did," Lisa said finally. "About Sam."

"Maybe you were right," Dean said, and Sam closed his eyes. "But it doesn't matter." His heart clenched and Sam wanted to roll over and cover his ears, feeling guilty and pleased and like something deep down was aching but might have clicked back into place.

"Are you going to sleep?" Lisa said eventually, in a smaller voice.

"Yeah," Dean said, and Lisa answered, "Liar."

Then only silence, until Sam heard Dean shuffle across the room and felt him touch his shoulder lightly. "You can go back to sleep now, Sammy," he said, voice gentle, and some of the tension melted away.

~.~

Dean got a job. Lisa and Ben treated Sam like a stray cat with three legs.

The dreams left him exhausted every morning, but at least he still wasn't waking anyone up screaming at the top of his lungs. They had a routine. It was enough. More or less. Sometimes Lisa looked at him sideways like Sam was some kind of broken thing, which he supposed he kind of was.

Ben didn't seem to know what to do with him.

Sam moved through the world feeling detached and disconnected, like he was sliding along glass that marked an invisible divide, and somewhere along the line Dean had found the door through and was walking with him on the opposite side; there and visible but in another world where he knew how to talk to people and how to act and how to be.

All things he didn't understand, not anymore. It seemed to come so easily to Dean. Dean knew how to talk to people, how to pass, how to meet neighbors and go to barbeques. Sam was just his little brother. A little strange, a little off in the head. Harmless, best avoided.

Sometimes Sam just wanted to leave; leave and never come back. Walk out of town and just keep walking, and find a quiet place to wait for Hell to overtake him.

But Dean would always come looking, and Sam didn't want to cause that kind of trouble.

Dean deserved better, after all this time.

Sam did his best to help around the house. Mostly he washed dishes. Ben came up to him after lunch one weekend when Dean was out at work and shifted back and forth, seeming awkward. "Hey," he said, after several moments of silence. Sam nearly jumped.

People speaking to him tended to take him by surprise of late.

"Um," he said. "Hey. Ben." The kid, Sam observed, even held himself like Dean when Dean wasn't sure how to start a conversation.

"Dean said I could talk to you about math homework," Ben said abruptly. "He said you were good at it. Really smart."

Sam imagined hearing those words out of Dean's mouth and smiled, self-consciously. "I'm not a good teacher," he said. "Maybe you should ask your mom." Dishes were easy. Dishes didn't respond, didn't ask questions, didn't give you worried looks.

People were the ones Sam had trouble with these days.

~.~

Dean sat next to him on the back porch. It was a quiet evening, and the sounds were repetitive, soothing. "You didn't want to help Ben with his homework?" His brother said mildly. "I thought you'd get a kick out of that."

Sam shrugged. "I dunno. Not really…not really me anymore, is it?"

Dean seemed, for some reason, disappointed. "I thought you'd like it," he repeated, and fell silent for a moment before turning to look directly at him. "Sam," he said, deadly serious, "Is there somewhere you'd rather be?"

"No," said Sam, firmly this time, because there wasn't; there was no place in the world where he fit anymore. This place wasn't his, but nowhere else would be either.

And he was just going to have to live with that, as long as he had to.


End file.
